Robert Redford: 'How He Kept His Radical Edge'

Bad timing for a headline at the Internet Movie Database this past Saturday:

How he kept his radical edge

Robert Redford plays an ageing anti-war activist in his latest movie, The Company You Keep – just one more incarnation in an ever-changing image

Robert Redford’s new film sees the Hollywood liberal play a craggy radical, hiding away from a criminally subversive past under an assumed name. Once the FBI rumbles him, the agents on his trail spend some time comparing the image of his lined face to that of his much younger, 1970s, moustachioed self.

Cinema audiences across the world have travelled down that same long, ageing trail with Redford too, watching as his luminous youth in the role of Bubber in the 1966 film The Chase was gradually replaced, first by the poised cynicism of The Candidate and then by the stately leading man in Out of Africa or the worn-out sleaze of his Indecent Proposal to Demi Moore. Yet, as a man, Redford’s radical zeal remains undimmed.

See full article at The Guardian – Film News »

Shouldn’t Hollywood leftists be toning down the “radical zeal”? Especially in light of this item from Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism: “Scarborough Only Blames ‘Radicalism’ For Boston Terror, Not Radical Islamism”:

In an effort to cut against the excrutiatingly politically correct mindset on his home at MSNBC, Joe Scarborough mocked left-wing analysts who spent the weekend looking inward at America for possible motives behind the Boston marathon terror attacks.

Citing a column by Kevin Cullen, Scarborough said:

“Before you engage in the whole why do they hate us clap-trap, let’s just talk about the fact that these guys were evil. They were beasts. And guess what? It wasn’t our fault that they put a bomb at the feet of an eight-year-old boy.”

So far so good. But then, Scarborough can’t shed the PC shackles enough to take the extra, logical step of pointing to the leading cause of terror attacks in the world today. He uses the watered down “radicalism” as a catch-all to encompass all radical ideas under one umbrella, as if “radicalism” is the biggest threat in our society. He just can’t bring himself to point out the significant fact that the terrorists were hugely influenced by radical Islamism. “Don’t blame society for that. Blame radicalism, blame evil, blame them (the Tsaraev brothers.)”

But it’s not like Redford would support terrorist bombings, would he?

[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”62549″]

Scott Whitlock of Newsbusters summarized Redford’s appearance with fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos on April 2nd:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

As I mentioned last week, it’s pretty rare for someone to drop the mask and admit that he’s cool with terrorist bombings; at Front Page, Bosch Fawstin explores “Robert Redford’s Terrorist Heroes”:

“ALL OF IT,” said Robert Redford, when asked if he supported the bombings by The Weather Underground.

Redford came out for terrorism on a mainstream morning television show in an interview with democrat-operative-leftist-hack George Stephanopoulos, who was slobbering over Redford’s pro-terrorist movie, The Company You Keep. I drew my illustration of Redford, below, days ago, and I wonder if he’s for the terrorist attack in Boston today. Or maybe he wants to wait and see if it’s leftist terrorists before he decides he’s all for it. Below is a list of what Robert Redford was for, via Sean Hannity on FOX News.

The Weather Underground’s history of terrorism consisted of:

1970: SFPD Bombing (1 Killed)

1970: NYPD Bombing (7 Hurt)

1970: NYC Explosion (3 Killed)

1971-72: Capital & Pentagon Attacked

1981: Armed Robbery (3 Killed)

(As John Boot at PJ Media notes: The Vietnam War, of course, had been over for years, [by 1981] which gives the lie to the film’s claim that the Southeast Asia conflict was anything but a pretext for the terrorist network.)

In their effort to give the aging Redford the full radical chic treatment, the Guardian profile the IMDB links can’t be bothered to notice the cognitive dissonance between lines such as this: “Redford is aligned with the anti-gun lobby in Hollywood, questioning the level of violence in entertainment,” and Redford’s pro-terrorism statements, such as this, only a couple of short paragraphs later in the same article:

The Company You Keep, based on the novel by Neil Gordon, has so far won two awards from the Venice Film Festival and is a hard look back at the radical era that made Redford. As a young actor in the late 1960s, he followed the leftwing organisation Weather Underground, founded on the University of Michigan campus with the express aim of overthrowing the American government.

“I supported their cause because I also thought the Vietnam war, just like the Iraq war, was built and sold on a faulty premise,” Redford has said. He saw the risks members took and watched the movement destroy itself. “I thought, ‘Gee, there’s quite a story in this. I don’t think it’s a story I want to tell right now’, he has recalled.

Journalists who interview Hollywood celebrities rarely ask tough questions, for fear of being tossed off the gravy train of easy access to stars. Will any reporters have the guts to ask Redford his take on the Boston bombers, and the rights of those people who were terrorized by them, both during their initial blasts and when the terrorists tried to escape the authorities later in the week?

(Incidentally, Redford’s embrace of radical chic in his dotage — and all of the hype the sympathetic MSM have given this film isn’t exactly giving him the edge at the box office.)

Related: “TMZ Targets Model for Donning Dress Decorated with Guns” — why are they giving model Karolina Kurkova grief, and not a superstar actor/director who is espousing pro-terrorist views? Or to reverse the equation, if Redford — and, as Christian Toto notes at Big Hollywood — anybody who wears a Che T-shirt gets a pass, why not Kurkova as well?

More: From Ace, “The Passive-Aggressive Voice: Newest Narrative From the Left and Media (But I Repeat Myself): It Was ‘Society’ to Blame, By Which is Meant Us”:

The left considers itself outside society, a critic apart from it, above it, superior to it, as a teacher is above and superior to his students. So any mention of “society” is an attempt to put blame on others. And the “we/us” language is the Accusatory version of the pronoun; they don’t mean they themselves.

Have you ever heard someone on the left specifically take responsibility for such a horror? The left could say, for example, “Perhaps by promoting terrorists as icons and to university professorships, we have transmitted the idea that terrorism is acceptable.” That would be a real expression of “We’re to blame,” we including the speaker. The true use of “we.”

But of course they never say such things. It’s always “We’re all to blame, because of various things you and specifically not I are guilty of.”

Also note that Melissa Harris-Perry pushes the idea that “we” (by which she means “You”) are “Otherizing” the terrorists — conceiving them as entirely unlike you — in order to reduce your own culpability for their actions.

Apparently it never occurs to this supposed intellectual that that’s precisely what she herself is doing.